Mrs. California Goes to Business School
Two MBAs walk into a bar. Everyone else leaves.
200 soon-to-be MBAs join a WhatsApp group. One of them creates a spreadsheet with everyone’s birthdays on it so that they can all post avalanches of “Happy Birthday _____!” messages to people they have never met.
(A joke that would be funnier if it wasn’t true.)
I’ve never identified as the MBA Type because, although I do love attention and winning, I don’t like wearing clothes that cannot be slept in. I do like helping people figure out how to make money though, so I told myself that I would only ever consider getting the degree if I could (A) do it for free, (B) do it in one year, and (C) get in to a respectable school that wasn’t so respectable as to attract Prestige Mongers. (Read: justifications for not going disguised as conditions.)
But when a school in Madrid miraculously ticked all the boxes, it gleamed like a Glass Slipper. “I shall dawn it!” I said (or maybe I said, “I guess I pretty much have to go now?” — can’t remember). Iain and I prepared our West Coast exit strategy. Sayonara overpriced sandwiches and Fogust and non-budget airlines! Tapas and functional public transportation here we come!
Then yesterday, as I Googled “depreciation expense asset or liability” with three minutes to go on my Accounting assessment test, distracted by a stream of notifications from seven people trying to find each other in a bar in Madrid (on the same 200-person WhatsApp group), I felt a pang.
Am I really doing this? Am I really trading in my people, my 5:00AM Mount Tam summiters, my kombucha and beer brewers, my Tuesday Tracksters, my ‘What is the nature of consciousness’ debaters, my lycra-loving taco eaters… to go spend a year with a cadre of lol-ing Crossfit birthday zealots in suits?
I visit the ocean in the mornings. It’s not a ritual, per se — just a whim that turned into a pattern that turned into a habit. Now when I wake up, my mouth feels sticky until I brush my teeth and my mind feels sticky until I inhale a breath of saline mist.
It’s a good place to think about finitude; tinyness. Actually it’s a good place to think about nothing — the sound and light rinse most thoughts away. But later in the day, when I remember the ocean, I think about tinyness. Not in the sense of time (“our lives are so short compared to the span of history”) or in the sense of impact (“we are insignificant blips on the planet”). But in the sense of possibility. Every time I look at something, there are a million things I’m not looking at. For every person I meet, there are a million others I never will. For every thing I know, every moment I experience, every decision I make, there are zillions of mysteries and untrodden paths.
I find this incredibly comforting. Especially for ‘What the hell am I doing?’ pangs.
I recently had a dream where I made a pact with God. (I’ll not endeavor to describe what “God” was in my dream, but suffice to say, it was Weird.) The pact was something along the lines of: How about this? You take care of the whole Being Infinite thing (eternal, omniscient, etc), and I will take care of whole being finite thing (mortal, flawed, etc). So long as the universe exists in all of its vastness, I solemnly swear to only live One Tiny Life — and to experience all of the regrets, hopes, FOMO, surprises, bliss and confusion that come included in the Being Alive package. Deal? Deal.
The dream pact is a little too meta to quell my rage at the sentence: “Any1 meeting 4 drinx later?” (I’m not that zen). But when my breath constricts at the thought of not seeing my friend’s baby crawl or my roommate’s next gig or the start line of the first cross country race with my teammates, I remember the pact. Not all the lives. Not even two lives. Just the one. One filled with cool people and annoying people in inevitably equal measure.
PS
To my future classmates and friends who may stumble across this on the internet at some point in the future: No hard feelings. But you have to admit the birthday messages were seriously insane.
